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November 25, 2006

Memory of 39

I know that because I was there at the same Brentwood School with him - and, unlike so many of the self-serving, fact-bending childhood accounts which cross this desk at the TLS, his recall is provably near-perfect.

Or at least provably near-perfect to me.

Rhys Jones's Semi-Detached has been deservedly well received by fans and
reviewers. The book is a hymn to an Essex suburbia which, if not now
wholly lost, is not as warm and welcoming a thing as it once was. Many
of us miss the old ways of Brentwood
and the other gentler early sixties societies like it. We are nostalgic
because, although we were happy be mockers at the time (especially the
comic generation of Rhys Jones) we never signed up for it to disappear.

Hey. Stop. Leave the opinionising aside. Someone else is reviewing it for the TLS.

Semi-detached
was sent out to one of our writers before I realised exactly what it
was. I might otherwise have been sorely tempted to test our readers'
patience by trading memories of master's nicknames and light
brutalities with the bunsen-burner hose.

That unintended decision to stand back was certainly for the best.

My critical reaction to reading this book was that rare and uncritical thing - simple bloody marvel.

There again in these pages is
suddenly my old English master, Mr 'Spud' Baron, the drama teacher with
the rumoured 'Pilkington glass fortune', the secret service past, the
Rachmaninov fingers, the director for whom 'acting was paramount, his
acting mainly' and whose rehearsals were 'an opportunity for him to
perform the entire play himelf'.

And a return too for Mr 'Bilge' Gilbert, the science teacher who
began every sentence with 'Aww ginn', a phrase which we would all
repeat in assembly whenever there was need for a corporate rebellion.
Even in our school not every boy could be clipped around the ear with
'Percy', the flexible gas pipe. It was Bilge who made absolutely
certain that I would become a classicist.

And then there is the restoration of Mr 'Daddy' Brooks, the
grammarian who would not allow mention of the number 39, or the Warley
mental asylum, still less the name Percy - since all were associated in
different ways with Mr Gilbert. Every Brentwood master, I had forgotten, had his own designated number in the school regulations known as 'The Blue Book'.

I had better stop now before I praise further Rhys Jones's recall of
Spud's explosion against Christopher Fry's excessively modernist The Boy With The Fart, his crowd scene with Douglas Adams as Julius Caesar - or the day the future comic star was demoted from Lady Macbeth to Third Witch.

Can I find anything wrong? The author possibly underestimates the
ill-feeling between Mr Baron and the art master, set-painter and
poster- designer Mr Featherstone.

Then perhaps Rhys Jones wasn't there when Spud first saw the poster for his Winter Theatricals production of Arms and the Man, a purple head between two outstretched elbows and hands, and screamed 'No, not that kind of arms, you cretin'.

Hey. Stop again. That omission surely seems a small fault - and an
even smaller concern except to those surviving few (hundred?) of us who
survived Brentwood School in the sixties and are still reading from time to time.

Comments

Uncanny! I also wondered at RJ's amazing abilities to nail "Spud" and "Bilge" and co. But then he seems to have done a lot of digging, asking around, at least one trip back down the Ingrave Road. I would have liked to have seen some photos in the book, although there are a couple on Friendsreunited.

Quick follow-up since it's down memory lane we wend this blog. At Brentwood there was also a master called Billy Raybould--I wonder if either Sir Peter or RJ was taught by him. He'd been a Welsh rugby international (I've just googled him up) and had banged his knee or something and had taken up teaching. (And why not, of course.) In what must have been his first year at the school (perhaps 1969?) he had us (14 year olds) read T. E. Lawrence's "Seven Pillars of Wisdom," perhaps mindful of Paul Pennyfeather's "longest essay regardless of merit" principle but applied to the reading rather than the writing. (And why we couldn't have read Waugh's "Decline and Fall"?) In a rare moment of both candour and temerity, I ventured the opinion that it was turgid and dull. His answer has stuck with me ever since: "Don't forget that Lawrence wasn't writing for 14 year olds." (I wasn't bold enough, however, to pose the perhaps inevitable follow-up question . . . )